Teleconferencing, which includes voice conferencing and video conferencing, allows a number of persons located in geographically disparate areas to participate in a telephone or video call with one another. As businesses and organizations strive to cut costs such like those for meals, travel and lodging which are related to “person-to-person” meetings, teleconferencing is expected to be to be even more and more attractive.
Many organizations have come to rely upon designated teleconference numbers that can be used for a certain time, where each participant of a teleconference can join the conference by calling such a designated number. Frequently several teleconferencing systems also require a joining participants to provide some kind of identification code before the participant can join to a conference call. The identification code may be a personalized identifier or it may be an identification code associated with the teleconference in question.
Since all participants have to call the same number for joining the conference there is always a risk that someone calls the wrong number or even loses information about what number to call for joining the conference call. In particular as each teleconference can be associated with different teleconference number and identification codes, remembering and keeping track of a such information can sometimes be a hard or maybe even completely impractical task.
Some alternatives for tracking such information when e.g. away from one's computer system or calendaring application may include manually writing down each teleconference number and identification code or may include using a personal digital assistant. Such solutions are unfortunately somewhat prone to error.
For the reasons above various systems have been developed for assisting in the setting up a teleconference between a number of participants.
One way of assisting conference participants in joining a teleconference is disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,133,512 in which document an interactive voice response system and a method of aggregating conference calls can include registering a caller with the interactive voice response system. Included is also access in a calendar system used by a registered caller for determining teleconference data that specify at least a telephone number for a scheduled conference call. At approximately a time of the conference call the telephone number for the conference call are automatically called. The method also can include establishing contact with the registered caller and joining the registered caller with the conference call.
Even though prior art may assist in setting up a conference call, present solutions are often cumbersome in communication environments were several different communication equipments are used, which includes e.g. cellular telephones, wireless telephones, conventional landline phones, IP-based telephones which includes e.g. a computer.